94 Responses to Why?

Many women don’t grasp that in order to regulate and micro manage things in order to have it all, that they will have to work harder and more for less personal time and money. At the cost of their quality of life. Never mind that less men will be around to pitch in as women are also killing their prospects on that front by pushing men out of the job market. Women are control freaks yet by buying into feminism, have lost control because their lives are dictated by work schedules and status/consumerism that takes it away from them.

Yet when Sarah Palin, a woman who for all intents and purposes, “had it all” ( high level career, alpha husband, kids, money, fame, looks, etc) WOMEN excoriated her.
Woman simply cannot be happy, and the only thing they hate more than men is a good looking, successful woman.

My most sucessful female friends tend to be single and childless, all my male friends have a wife and kids. It is hard for us to find a partner that woudl not be threatened by our top school PhDs, which tend to be an asset for our male collegues.

(somehow I doubt someone with a “top school PhD” would spell so poorly…)

She states that great role models are women who are completely committed to their jobs, and powerful, like Angela Merkel or Susan Rice. And she also states that we need to reshape what success is – that it’s not the amount of money you make, etc., which comes from having these high-powered jobs.

She writes that we need to respect and accommodate women’s choices, but then we also need to push women to be leaders and have high powered jobs. Women need to be pushed and encouraged to have ambition, but they shouldn’t be looked down upon for taking time out to have a family.

This is just the idea that only the career driven woman’s choices are acceptable, and family decisions that are made from that frame are then appropriate. If you start out wanting a family and you are not worried about career, then you don’t have ambition and you aren’t making good women’s choices – where choice just means the narrow avenue of following the career driven track.

In the end this is just the female first perspective, for she realizes the hard compromises that have to be made to have family and career. And what is her solution: that compromises shouldn’t have to be made – we instead need to change the structure of the economy, the government, academia, and family life to accommodate and alleviate her cognitive dissonance. The dissonance that results from being hit in the head with reality.

24 hours in a day. We make time for the things we want to do. Simple as that.

Does it somehow surprise Mrs. Slaughter that wholeheartedly following a particular ambition means that you have to sacrifice other things that more “traditional” or humble people have? Should I point to the vast array of male scientists, mathematicians, or engineers who have toiled alone in virtual obscurity their entire lives just to advance human knowledge a hair’s breadth?

The funny part is that most of them wouldn’t give up that hair’s breadth contribution for the world.

From the Slaughter article: “These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.”

I mentioned this quote on a different blog yesterday. What she is suggesting here is that we pass MORE laws to allow women to do less work but receive the same rewards. The only way this is possible is to discriminate against men. It’s ludicrous beyond comprehension; the answer to the problem suggests itself, with women staying home to manage the household, especially when there are children, and men working outside the home. Why should we go to so much expense and social disruption to accommodate a handful of maladjusted women who seem to want to be hermaphrodites?

Slaughter also writes, “Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.”

She is telling women to do impossible things. No wonder young women are confused and unhappy. You CANNOT achieve the same career success as a man and put in the same hours he does, while simultaneously having children. You can try but you WILL be miserable. And notice how she gets in a jab at men at the end – it’s SO unfair to we poor women that we have to have the babies and you don’t. If only we could have pensises…no wait, even better, if only we could force you to have vaginas!

It is a far healthier approach to accept the laws of power, the laws of Game, Hypergamy, etc. and fashion a life around an understanding of them than to convince oneself that they are an exception to them.

There are those who seek power by changing the game – by lowering the basketball hoops in order to better shoot a basket – but in ‘leveling the playing field’ they only succeed in changing the nature of the competition to better suit their individual abilities, neither improving the game nor themselves. The temporary change of rules only serves their inadequacies in that game.

Then there are those who accept the game for what it is, they understand it and they master it (or at least attempt to do so). They understand the need for adversity and the benefits it gives them when they reach the next level of mastering the game – not only in technique, but from the confidence this genuinely and verifiably confers.

Don’t wish things were easier, wish you were better.

It’s the aberration who seeks to legitimize her cheating at the game as the new way the game should be played. Shoot the arrow, paint the target around it, and you’ll always get a bullseye.

Slaughter’s message isn’t a whistle blowing to warn women about the ‘have-it-all” lie, it’s a plea to western culture to ‘change the game’ to better suit women’s inadequacies in playing it effectively.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the sheer, egoistic, self-convinced degree of entitlement necessary to actually believe that the very fabric of society should alter itself to better suit the conditions of women. Reality should literally reform itself inorder for her to pursue her professional potential AND be a mother to her delinquent sons.

Only the enormous egoism of a Princeton feminist-academic could conjure expectations of such magnitude.

Is an absolute study in this dilemma. Once about 2 years ago I managed to establish regular direct communication with Jackie. Her and I debated regularly over email and she invited me to write counter point on Purse Pundit. She told me I managed to actually challenge her views on some things…..well…..I spent a lot of time writing a rebuttal to some guys article that was titled “Why I’m a male Feminist”….and I sent it to her. I was quite proud of what I had done and looking forward to seeing it featured there as counterpoint, a new thing for her because the rest is cheer leading.
Her response ended up being that she felt my life experience had shaped my views differently than hers had and she wouldn’t post it.
I raise this because hers is an interesting story, her bio I mean, and she is very pleasant, I can honestly say I liked her and enjoyed our interactions and may even attempt it again. But go there for a trove of insight into the subject at hand here. Her husband is a theologian, and she is a money manager and devoted! feminist in terms of the kool aid of wage gaps and such.

There is a study buried at Purse Pundit done by I think Morgan Stanely, and it was based on some incentives attempted in Australia to get women into STEM jobs. The study was plain reading proof that the feminist meme was diametrically opposed to the innate preference of the women, yet Jackie and her followers saw it as the need to double down…after offering free degrees, PAY to study, assured top jobs and posting IF they would go STEM….all sorts of adverts and PSA type stuff, no significant change in behavior was noted in Australian women towards STEM careers. I may look that up and link it here, or go there and find it if interested.

One often reads about how, for example, companies with female executives and BODs with more women “do better”. Then you see they are comparing some fashion powerhouse to a cell phone maker….anyway the point is here that even in this success is being redefined.

Imagine the guys innovating the cell phones and software, and the dull grey metal of the prototype but wowzer the functions and cool new things it can do.

Now, imagine the gals who take that phone and design a carry pouch. They will bejewel that thing and put aplique and whatever bling needed and “innovate” all sorts of new fashion to carry the phone.

lets turn those ladies lose running the whole SHEbang. We’d be carrying friggin rotary cell phones around in Louis Vuitton shoulder bags, and those women would be seen as driving success.

I should also add that Slaughter simply regurgitates the standard feminist boilerplate by claiming feminine victimhood for having to make the same sacrifices men are expected to make by default. Men DO have to make the same trade-offs; the only difference is it’s so expected of men to do so that you don’t read overwritten articles in the Atlantic by men bemoaning those sacrifices.

Maybe Slaughter needs to hear what we tell men who do complain about their sacrifices; Man the fuck Up!

RT wrote, “I should also add that Slaughter simply regurgitates the standard feminist boilerplate by claiming feminine victimhood for having to make the same sacrifices men are expected to make by default. ”

I think that is a good point. When I was reading through the comments following Ms. Slaughter’s article on The Atlantic website, I noticed that one female commenter had written the following:

“It’s all well and good to say that people must make their own choices and take “their rewards and consequences” but someone has to be President, Supreme Court judge, CEO, or senior partner of that senior law firm. And as long as the deck is stacked against the gender that (whether by socialization or biological imperative) has historically borne the responsibility for home and family, women will continue to be poorly represented in the highest ranks of society. We are where we are because the system is broken, not because women lack the motivation or ambition to succeed.”

I was baffled by her comment; in what way is the “deck stacked against” women in the work world? And why should is be stacked FOR us? The whole point of Slaughter’s article is that women shouldn’t have to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve the same career success as men, but she doesn’t answer WHY women shouldn’t have to.

One of the problems is that the role of mother is not as respected as it should be in the mainstream. You show me a corporate executive and a woman who has raised three responsible children into adulthood, I’ll tell you which one has more of my respect. In this society I would hazard to bet that the sacrifices and effort the mother put into raising her children outweighed those of the executive many times over. Furthermore, her contribution to society will be higher. A wife who stands by her husband and supports him makes him more effective in everything he does. A mother who raises strong boys and decent girls continues giving to the future. The corporate bitch enriches only herself and only for today.

The funny thing is, in her social circles, she’s incredibly brave for stepping out and telling half the truth, about not having it all, about a lot of men and women being uncomfortable with a man being the beta in the relationship, about the necessity to sacrifice so much for the top tier career and the near physical impossibility for a good mother to leave her kids to the extent necessary to do the top tier career thing.

But then her Rationalization Hamster falls into the water where her non-bicycle riding fish eats it, and gets indigestion. So sad. She almost had something pretty good there.

“You wanted to run with the bulls, so why don’t you shut up and run with the bulls?”

This is not a very thoughtful response to a six-page article. Although in the end she suggests more ways for women to combine children and prestigious careers, Slaughter’s admission that “I realized that I didn’t just *need* to go home. Deep down, I *wanted* to go home.” is really heartening.

Dalrock, you don’t really want women to continue Lady Macbeth-ing it until society completely unravels, so why urge Slaughter, even sarcastically, to go down with the sinking H.M.S. Feminism? Do you really want women to rethink their lives and embrace their femininity, or are you only interested in hosting a never-ending vent session for your male readers?

Women are getting fed up with the “angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.” Thus these articles about Millennial women “burning out,” and the scorn that Elizabeth Wurtzel’s stale rant about SAHMs and the war on women garnered even from Jezebel (another Atlantic columnist has a good response here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/in-defense-of-stay-at-home-moms/258717/ ).

I think the “run with the bulls” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek, but only partly.

We all know most women won’t do what Slaughter has done because doing so is considered “traitorous” to the sisterhood and to their “cause”.

And we also know that most women aren’t high-powered bureaucrats earning well into six figures, either. But most women BELIEVE they should have the same options as Slaughter does. Hence women uttering idiocies like “If Murphy Brown can have a child out of wedlock in her 40s, then I can too!”

What’s the problem with male venting? We have to hold it in all day at work, at home, in front of our bosses, our coworkers, our wives, our kids, our neighbors. We are constantly told to “man up” and “grow up” and “suck it up” and “deal with it”. Why do you have a problem with men coming here to voice a humorous take on truths we hold to be self-evident?

You know, as a guy who lost a terrific job and career, and then spent a long time as a betafied “domestic engineer” while trying to get back into meaningful employment, I’m pretty goddamn sure I WILL BE that guy on my deathbed saying I wish I’d spent more time at the office.

Rollo, the article was more nuanced than that. Slaughter thinks sacrificing your every waking moment (and your sleep as well) to the maw of your Moloch-job is bad for men as well.

“Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.” ”

Also:

“I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with an enormously demanding job.

It is hard to imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work.”

I sort of like you, Flirtyintrovert (well, maybe “don’t have anything in particular against you” would be more accurate), so I’ll take a break from lurking to say to well-intentioned things to you:

1: This is Dalrock’s blog. If he wants to turn this place into a “never ending vent session,” it’s his right to do so. He doesn’t owe anything to anybody, and isn’t obligated to please anyone else, including you or any other of his female commenters. You may not agree with that, and you’re entitled to. However, this means you should simply shrug your shoulders, take him off your blogroll (if he was even on it) and stop commenting at a place you no longer find intriguing. I no longer comment here much either, but the difference between you and I is that I’m not lecturing him on how to run his own blog.

If you don’t like how Dalrock does things at his place, or if you don’t like the Manosphere generally, then just leave rather than wringing your hands over whether or not Dalrock or anybody else is alienating women/Christians/whatever. I don’t say this as a condemnation or an insult, BTW–this is pretty much the advice I’ve tried to follow, which I merely pass on to you.

2: More importantly, I have to ask if you really read the article. While Ms. Slaughter’s introspection–such as it is–may be laudable, her ‘solutions’ sound more or less like the sort of standard feminist talking points most of the people here oppose (and, one assumes, you do as well). We need a woman president? We need more women in charge? We “we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too?” Why should Dalrock, or any other man here, be particularly enthusiastic about this?

Now, You might say that “the article was more nuanced than that. Slaughter thinks sacrificing your every waking moment (and your sleep as well) to the maw of your Moloch-job is bad for men as well.”

And that may be true. But it’s a decision we men will make for ourselves. We don’t really want “women leaders” making it for us. With this in mind, I hope you can understand why many men, including our host, aren’t that eager to embrace Ms. Slaughter just yet.

This is not a very thoughtful response to a six-page article. Although in the end she suggests more ways for women to combine children and prestigious careers, Slaughter’s admission that “I realized that I didn’t just *need* to go home. Deep down, I *wanted* to go home.” is really heartening.

I have to admit I only made it through three or four pages of her emoting before giving up. Grown ups don’t write like that. It is amazing that this woman has been given positions of authority. Rollo nailed it:

Think about that for a moment. Think about the sheer, egoistic, self-convinced degree of entitlement necessary to actually believe that the very fabric of society should alter itself to better suit the conditions of women. Reality should literally reform itself inorder for her to pursue her professional potential AND be a mother to her delinquent sons.

Women who go for the high powered education and careers typically held by men aren’t driven so much by the idea of accomplishing something big, but more so by the idea of the validations they will receive. They want the attention that high powered men have first and possibly the sense of accomplishment second.

Most women will not climb Everest because it’s there. They climb Everest for the attention and accolades they will receive. (Do I really need to say NAWALT?) Feminism has tried to further women in the workforce by changing society as Rollo said above. Not by actually teaching women to find joy and respect in themselves by accomplishing something difficult.

Dalrock, i was about to leave that message in a email to you, since i dont have your mail address im writing here.

—-

Hello fellow blogger. My name is Enigmático e Realístico and iam brazillian “red pill taker” blogger. Im posting concepts usually discussed on the manosphere for more than one year to the still small red pill takers from brazil.

Our manosphere is still small and disunited compared to you from the “main manosphere”.

I decided a little ago that now is the time to expand more the limits of the brazillian manosphere and so the american manosphere too. I want to make an “partnership” with you fellow’s to grow more our “underground web” and with that make our concepts more embracing.

I believe that now is a time on the history of the so called “manosphere” where the authors of all those good blogs are not just voices alone in the sea of the political correctness but a emerging power in freeing the minds of other men to guide us to a truthful life and relantionships.

The awakening of minds provided by the manosphere created a kind of “virus” that dominates quickly men like you and me that searchs to transcendes our ignorances. It is the “red pill virus”. That virus that frees ourselfs from the everyday lies from tell-a-vision, our the fake studies about male/female relantionships.

Every blogger has a importante paper on the awakening of minds, from PUA’s to MRA’s. Each one of them fills a blank of knowledge very important to clear more and more our vision from the lies of our brave new world order. Every good blogger from the manosphere have a important role on tell to us how a man should really be, and should really fight for.

So, i friendly ask you that you consider the possibility of linking my blog in yours. Know that i will link you independently of you link me or not. Next week i’ll create a page containing “International partners” and you will be there.

I early apologize myself if you see in my blog something like you have writen before in any post of you. Knows that i inspired myself in some of your ideas to create a few posts mines.

Thank you for reading my email, i just want that you answer me independently of linking my blog or not. I’ll appreciate that a lot.

I confess… I scrolled down, and noticed that there were another five pages to go. Life was too short..

So, consider, this: Men who could not have it all. Let’s take Composers, Male composers that is. Very few had children, or if they did reproduce, only one or so (which historically is a low number). The Bachs are the exception, of course. The dedication and obsession required, simply mitigates a normal life – my own teacher was childless. Consider again the English Bar (you will have to take my word for it) they are again a largely childless lot. An ordinary life and a career at the Bar just do not go together.

There is, of course, a reason why men strive to achieve success. It may be a pathway to the resources that will attract an attractive woman. It is regretable from a woman’s point of view that even a PhD from a top school does not add one percentage point to the attractiveness of a woman, or her appeal to a man, thus all the resources in the world that a woman can acquire cannot have that extra purpose of achieving a result beyond the occupation itself. Whether men are intimidated by that Doctorate is thus immaterial.

I think the “run with the bulls” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek, but only partly.

I mean it matter of factly, without either malice or sympathy. This woman made her life’s choices and now wants us to turn reality upside down so that she gets what she wants, whatever that is. She seems to want it to be easy for her to be exceptional.

@Flirty

Dalrock, you don’t really want women to continue Lady Macbeth-ing it until society completely unravels, so why urge Slaughter, even sarcastically, to go down with the sinking H.M.S. Feminism? Do you really want women to rethink their lives and embrace their femininity, or are you only interested in hosting a never-ending vent session for your male readers?

Women are getting fed up with the “angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.”

They aren’t my women, and they aren’t asking my advice. I trust they will make the choices which will make them happy. Barring that, I trust they will shut up about it and more importantly not expect me to come to their rescue. Same as I would a man. These women aren’t being victimized by a biased process. They are whining about the hard tradeoffs they boasted they wouldn’t have to make.

For all the English Lit and Communication degrees women receive you’d think someone would’ve taught them that periodicals aren’t meant to be their personal stream-of-thought catharsis outlets.

She tells us she is a law professor and was dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She claims that she writes “regular print and online columns on foreign policy”. How has this woman never learned to write, to focus her thoughts? It gives me a sense of what she must have really been doing vs what she thought she was doing in her description of her workday in the White House:

the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours…

@flirtyintrovert… You make the wise insight that no one–not man nor woman–ought to sacrifice their entire lives at the alter of the workplace. It’s true: No one wakes up at age 65 and says to themselves, “Damn! If only I’d spent more time at the office.” Yet somehow, society conveys the erroneous message that we can and should find lasting satisfaction in our careers. Otherwise, there’s something wrong with us–either we don’t “get it” or we’re not “having it all” like we should be. This falsehood is something the author Orson Scott Card, I believe, called “the myth of the career”. The real truth is: there are no “careers”; there are only jobs. The “career” is an illusion. I fully agree.

But Ms. Slaughter, however, doesn’t truly understand that message. She’s still inside the matrix and hasn’t entirely let go of the “career myth.” Now that she’s climbed the career ladder part-way and found the view less than it was cracked to be, she doesn’t question the wisdom of either her career or her life choices. Rather, she engages in solipsism and psychological projection. Her conclusion is that it’s society that needs to do all the changing here in order to allow her, as a woman, to feel more personal fulfillment. It’s society that needs to “lower the basketball hoop,” as Rollo put it, to make it easier for Ms. Slaughter to become company president and supermom–all at the same time. In short, Ms. Slaughter wants her proverbial cake and to eat it too.

Women who go for the high powered education and careers typically held by men aren’t driven so much by the idea of accomplishing something big, but more so by the idea of the validations they will receive. They want the attention that high powered men have first and possibly the sense of accomplishment second.

Most women will not climb Everest because it’s there. They climb Everest for the attention and accolades they will receive.

The first line of the six page column shows the truth in this:

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department…

I checked the box! Validate me!

Now that you know you must take me seriously, I’m going to ramble on about my feelings for six pages.

Are we trying to push the “stay at home” glory days? Annie-Marie Slaughter is a standard carousel riding slut who had a kid when she was over 35 years old. She is 53 today and at peak career while the child is still young.

From the article: “Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.”

Huh? She just got done telling us that men make sacrifices to get to the top of the corporate ladder too, but that somehow their sacrifices are socially sanctioned, then tells us straight up that women are burdened with trade offs that men don’t have to make? Also notice that what she’s really describing is a BIOLOGICAL REALITY that can’t be superseded by cultural imperatives or or legislation. But in the very next paragraph:

“You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.”

First she describes how the biology of human reproduction NECESSARILY limits women’s life choices and then follows up IMMEDIATELY with denial, denial, denial! I can have my cake and eat it too! And if only there were more women in leadership positions – cake for everyone!

I was curious exactly when she served in the White House based on her blaming her then 14 year old son for hurting her career. From what I found at Wiki, the son in question would be about 15, perhaps 16 now. I can’t imagine doing this to a teenager. This isn’t an obscure column on the web, it is the cover story for the current edition of Atlantic.

I also found something amusing. Her accomplishment (aside from being the first woman to work in her particular capacity for the third woman Secretary of State) was to enact long term change in the way the bureaucracy runs. From the wiki page on her (ending emphasis mine):

State Department career

On January 23, 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the appointment of Slaughter as the new Director of Policy Planning under the Obama administration.[1]

At the State Department, Slaughter was chief architect of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review whose first instantiation was released in December 2010.[10][11] Commenting upon the skepticism that often greets such reports, and reiterating Secretary Clinton’s strong desire that the QDDR become an essential part of the State Department policy process, Slaughter said: “I’m pretty sure you’re thinking, ‘I’ve heard this before,’ [a big plan to change the way a government agency works] But this is different.”

Different indeed. The very next line in her career bio has her leaving her “long term change” undone, just two months after the first review was released:

In February 2011 Slaughter returned to Princeton and is teaching a seminar on National Security Policy. She remains a consultant for the State Department.

The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) is a study by the United States Department of State, first started in 2009 and intended to be done every four years, that analyzes the short-, medium-, and long-term blueprint for the United States’ diplomatic and development efforts abroad. It seeks to plan on a longer-term basis than the usual year-to-year, appropriations-based practice…

You never hear a man *shocked* that he can’t see his family much when he has a high power job. To men, it’s like “uhhh… what did you expect?” Men know going in to the vast majority of situations that there will always be tradeoffs and sacrifices.

I somewhat applaud Mrs. Slaughter for saying this kind of stuff and going against the cronehood (notice how all of her peers hate hate hate younger women not sacrificing their lives like they did), but I rue the fact that her saying it is controversial in any way, shape or form.

Now that you know you must take me seriously, I’m going to ramble on about my feelings for six pages.

This is something I entirely don’t understand. People get out of control on length sometimes when it comes to blogs, but this is supposedly a mainstream print magazine. Everything I’ve seen connected with them or newspapers or anything else (speeches) that is IRL public usually has a strict limit on the number of words, time spent, and so on. I can see a print magazine or a major newspaper allowing a lot of words if it were something of considerable and unique value to the society at large (some kind of investigative journalism for instance), but for opinion pieces they usually aren’t *this* long for reasons that should be obvious to most of us. Maybe the megalomania involved with feminism goes up to the highest levels of the Atlantic?

But for being a highly educated person that’s served in the White House (or a highly educated editor of a well-known print magazine), you think they’d pick up on the importance of brevity in print media, and keep it to 400-500 words like most adults can who have written more than one or two things? And still get your point across?

FWIW I read this earlier today and got through 3/4 of the first page before I tl;dr’ed the thing. And I still really didn’t see much of value that she was saying.

From the concluding paragraphs: “I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more.”

This sums up the entire article, but she even doesn’t seem to realize it. “If only men could be taught to behave more like women.” – should have been the tile of the article.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the sheer, egoistic, self-convinced degree of entitlement necessary to actually believe that the very fabric of society should alter itself to better suit the conditions of women. Reality should literally reform itself inorder for her to pursue her professional potential AND be a mother to her delinquent sons.

Ok, I’ll think about it…..done. Now I can say what that looks like. It rather looks a lot like the last 40 years. Special school help, special tutors in college, Title IX, EEO / AA benefits,quotas in law schools, quotas in med schools, the whole glass floor that women like her stand on.

.All she is really asking for is more of the same special treatment that has been given to her and her sistas since she was a teenager. She was promised that she could “have it all”, merely because she’s female. So she wants “it all”.

hurp: you’re right; it’s not my business to demand that Dalrock write a different blog. If I want a longer response to Slaughter’s piece I should write one on my own blog. I know, I know. On the other hand, if my comments become too obnoxious to him, he is free to ban me.

I stand by my belief that Slaughter’s admission that women CANNOT combine career and family just like men is a step in the right direction, and warrants some recognition beyond “shut up.” Sure, she hopes for a different regime, someday, somewhere over the rainbow; but the brute fact is that she was forced to choose, and she chose family. And that made her happier. That’s what the young women who listened to her talk took away from it: they were relieved that she didn’t tell them they could have it all if only they were smarter, tougher, whatever. As a 20-something woman, I have been fighting my whole life to keep my eyes on my true desires and resist the intense, false shame that comes of admitting that my ambition is to marry and raise a family rather than to be a “young professional.” I don’t really mind being the Wrong Sort of White Person, but there are moments when the fear of being called lazy or childish cuts me to the quick. What can I say, I’m human. I rejoice in the smallest cracks in the iron curtain of feminism and wage-slave-ism.

“And that may be true. But it’s a decision we men will make for ourselves. We don’t really want “women leaders” making it for us. With this in mind, I hope you can understand why many men, including our host, aren’t that eager to embrace Ms. Slaughter just yet.”

Well, that’s her predicament, isn’t it? She won’t get a new paradigm until we have 50 women senators, and we won’t have 50 women senators until we have a new paradigm. So unless “you men” like her ideas, you won’t have to deal with women leaders. Sure, in theory we women could band together and vote only for female candidates. But there will never be as many women running for office as men, precisely for the reasons Slaughter enumerated.

So, did she jump, or was she pushed? – all that guff about remaining a consultant to The White House – don’t call us we’ll call you, I suspect.

I wouldn’t be surprise if this “daring” piece is a way of her to sell herself as a writer now that she doesn’t have a job. I’m usually not this cynic but Kate Bolick is already getting marriage proposals and that was what I though about her article “Look at me rich and famous and older I’m single” and now this woman seems to be selling something that resonates with women of similar class and income, and it has a similar in tone. “Yes I understand your problems but is not your fault is the fault of the system… again” I wouldn’t be surprised that she is fishing for a book deal and gets it and becomes a best seller about “modern workplace women issues”, YMMV.

Here was the part of the article that was the most ironic and summed it up best for me:

” And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.”

First part of that quote: We’re not happy with our achievements. In fact, we’re even less happy doing what we thought we wanted to do (and what men have always done) than before we achieved anything! What should we do? Why, lets add a second scoop on! Having more of whats making us unhappy will surely satisfy us and make it all better!

Second part: Lets make the world the best, safest place for women. Then it will also be the best, safest place for everyone!

Yup. Because men have the EXACT same needs as women, or so they think. Or rather, they don’t care. Women first, men and children last. And no, there is no second place. Not with women in charge.

From the concluding paragraphs: “I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more.”

From what I found at Wiki, the son in question would be about 15, perhaps 16 now. I can’t imagine doing this to a teenager.

She’s shaming him, hoping for better behavior, while at the same time casting for sympathy and showing that she is trying.

The best that can be said is that she went back to her family. I hope things work out for them, but am somewhat skeptical given that while she is now in the general vicinity of her family, she is still pursuing her “career” by one means or another.

Haha, that article was fun. Half the things she wrote, if I quoted them at a girl and claimed them as my own original thoughts, the girl would call me a misogynist and tell me how wrong and evil I am.

Runs into the problem that if companies start doing the female work-life balance thing, the one company that doesn’t is going to have a hell of a competitive advantage. Sucks – I’d rather have free time, even without kids – but it’s life.

Ha Odds! If all things were equal, yes, that company would be more economically viable. But in walks legislation, aka affirmative action, quotas and what have you and any company that tries to hire only men as a competitive advantage will be shut down with years of legal wranglings, harassment cases and sexism charges.

The whole feminist mantra believes that through the State they can force people, companies, entire countries to bow to their whims, so far they’ve succeeded and they shall succeed even further. However, none of that matters, their paradigm is built on an economic fault line and will collapse under its own weight. I truly hope more women take her approach and go career. Society truly needs to suffer at this point. It also hastens the approach of the inevitable societal collapse; and women and minorities will indeed suffer more.

I for one got through the first page of her ramblings, had a moment of “I’ve heard and seen this all before” and stopped reading. It’s a waste of time, they will not listen to conventional wisdom and therefore must learn and suffer their own fate the hard way.

Anyway, Americans are already living in a State that cares not one iota about their citizens and indeed has decided that citizenship is worth nothing and can be given to the children of illegal immigrants through an executive order as it’s, in the words of Obama, “The right thing to do…”.

Hardly a word spoken about the kind of person Slaughter is- CFR, Head of the Wilson School in Princeton, Policy Grouper, Brookings, National Security Network, Project Syndicate, Butch Clinton’s henchwomyn, etc, etc

She is responsible for more death, torture, illegal detentions, nation wrecking and organized criminality than the top five Mafia Dons of the 1940’s

You think wrecking society through the reorganization of its primary structures troubles her one iota?

I think it is the very core personality trait of sociopaths like Frau Slaughter-Moravcsik to do whatever is humanly possible to disrupt, overturn, undermine, gut and destroy anything that gives off the faintest whiff of health and sanity, whether it’s a successful tribal based Nation state or her own male offspring. It is the nature of the beast. That she has the slightest twinge of regret over her own spawn and her failure to suckle them sufficiently is such a pathetic afterthought as to not be worth mention. Like an obese trencherman regrets the morsel he did not consume, there is no loss, there is only the obscene detritus left behind…

I have now been brave enough to at least skim over the entire essay at Atlantic, and I think I now know why Mrs Slaughter was never home until late in the evening and sometimes even slepped on the Office Couch: for heaven sake love, EDIT IT. No wonder those memos and reports took for ever, if the essay with is anything to go by.

I also picked up the following: That women can have babies between 25 and 45 (she had two at 38 and 40) and thus as women live longer than men there is no reason why women should not work for fifty or more years well into their seventies. What a splendid idea! – but don’t accuse me of oppressing women – this is a woman’s idea.

But what really gets me is: In a nation of 300 Million souls, and on the basis of her ‘poor me – but notice how important I am’ essay, is Mrs Slaughter really the best that your nation can produce for the position of Director of Policy Planning at your State Department. If she were applying to your corporation for a position and you were aware of the contents of the essay, what confidence would you have in her, and by implication any other women of her ilk?

Slaughter, like all feminists, wants and expects single men to act like married men by sacrificing and devoting all their attention and resources to women (plural not singular) instead of themselves. Married men do it because there is a payoff in the form of well cared for children and home. But single men are single precisely because they are not or can’t be married and therefore have zero reason to want to support women as a whole. In fact it directly contradicts their own self interest, something hypergamous women will never, never do. The constant refrain of feminists is, “if only I did not have to support myself, I could …” “or I would not have to…” For them, the grass is always greener on the other side so they are never fulfilled or contented.

It’s been reported that the Slaughter article is getting a record number of hits on the ‘Atlantic’ website.

I’m not normally a fan of Laura Wood, ‘The Thinking Housewife’ (I find her blog puzzling in many ways) but she has an interesting take in her post Oh My, We Can’t Have It All – Yet:

What Slaughter does not acknowledge is that such equality could only be achieved through state-enforced compulsion. Businesses must be restricted in their freedom to hire on merit alone. This is totalitarian and does not bode well for business success, which ultimately harms — oh no! — women.

And the equality Slaughter envisions clearly doesn’t work out for women at large. More women live alone. More women are in debt. More women are childless. More women have sexual diseases. More women are desperately seeking husbands. More women *do not come into existence* in the first place. More women are victims of sexual violence. More women suffer an economy in which the State takes over so many of the functions of the family that it is bankrupt. And on, and on, and on.

It took her 15years to figure out that she needs to spend more time with her children?
That train has left the station, it is likely too late to rebuild that relationship with her kids.

Also, “need 50 woman senators” to fix this inequality of opportunity? Talk about doubling down on stupid. I’m no Randian, but this quote is truth, “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

Rollo, the article was more nuanced than that. Slaughter thinks sacrificing your every waking moment (and your sleep as well) to the maw of your Moloch-job is bad for men as well.

And people who do not WANT to do that do not do it. However, it is nonsense, absolutely puerile nonsense, to structure the workplace in a way that tamps down and stifles the ambition of those who DO want to do that — because they contribute a lot more than people who are “balanced” do, and it’s their choice to do it.

In my view, it’s silly to be that dedicated to your work unless you are going to really blow the doors off and rise to the top, and you want that a lot — and if that’s what you want, go for it. We don’t need a nanny state or some regulator finger wagging at such people. Let them invest the time they want, and let them lead. They want it more than I do (than we do, perhaps).

I have worked in a F200 corporate environment for 15 years now, and women generally get all the balance they ask for. However, their ability to rise in the ranks is, of course, limited by the degree of that balance. It’s the same for men — although men don’t ask for balance around kids as much, but you have single guys who take days off for long weekend travel, and some married Dads who leave every day punctually at 5 to have a predictable family life. It’s their choice. They advance to the mid-ranks and generally not beyond that. And that’s perfectly fine. The other people ARE, after all, more dedicated to the job and the company and in many cases contributing more, especially if they are also smart.

We do not need a nanny state or a finger wagging professor telling people how to work and organize their work-life balance. Different people will make different choices, and there are tradeoffs there. Trying to get rid of the trade-offs only punishes the most dedicated workers — which is extremely unfair.

I have no sympathy at all for the “men don’t have the same tradeoffs to face as women do” argument. The reason why women face these choices is because (1) they don’t want to marry a Mr. Mom and (2) they have a maternal instinct that they cannot, despite decades of feminist programming to the contrary, completely suppress. Too bad. Make your choices. Don’t try to reorganize the entire social and economic structure around your own hypergamy and maternal instinct at the expense of others who have other priorities and have made other choices.

Agreed. I work in the same environment. All the capable men and women in my group basically make their own schedules. Kid has a game at 2? I go watch it. Lot’s of work to do? Start after kids go to bed or get up early. Nobody in senior management cares as long as you deliver. Period. Doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. You deliver, you’re good. You don’t, you’re out.

To get on the track to senior management you have to commit to moving your family all over to where the promotions are. You have to post for every single company late meeting and road trip and you are expected to live at the office. Every day. All day. Even on weekends. The demands are relentless and unending.

So for the folks who choose to chase that brass ring they know the deal. I’ve seen lot’s of men go for it and almost all of them are married. If their wife does work it’s more in a job like mine where they can work out of the house or be home every day when the kids come home. I see very few marriages where both are high flying senior execs.

But for the ladies who chase this I see a trail of divorce or spinsterhood. Once they get a promotion or two they start hanging out with the alpha males of the corporate world and the husband has to go. The rub is that in all the years I have worked I have only seen one of these women get remarried. I know it’s anecdotal, but most all these never married or divorced upper level managers and senior executive women start driving expensive cars, buy expensive homes, clothes, salon work and on and on. Hey, it’s their choice, but the pool of men that meets their standards shrinks so drastically it’s almost laughable.

Some years ago I had exposure to a never married woman in upper management who, at the age of 40, decided that all she needed to do was throw her dream out publicly and it would happen. With no boyfriend on the radar she decided that within one year she would be engaged. Walked around telling this to anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, she was one of those people who are ignorant of their faults. No boyfriend bit on the internet dating sites. No guy materialized in all the single mingle type events she went to for “Executives”. For some of the ladies who come here I’d like to tell you that it was because all men were afraid of her success, but I can’t. It’s because all the traits she developed that made her suitable for upper management made her a thoroughly unpleasant prospect for dating. Everything was a comparison and no area of your life was spared. Funny enough, I can’t think of one successful upper level male manager I have ever worked with that cared about this. They already knew they were studs. They didn’t need to prove it to anyone.

And if they were single or divorced, the ladies came running. Imagine that.

@Brendan
Another glaring problem is that we live in a global world, even if all women had the power to change the way USA schedules work to make it more friendly so women can have it all, that will only means that the other countries will have more productive and even more advantages against USA economy. Why wait six months for an American product that China can make in a week? I can only imagine how many other countries would benefit from this change on “work ethic”. I think she kinds of forget that America is not the center of the universe and if they get behind someone else will take over, YMMV.

Yes, the cases I have seen of very high-flying women are about 1/2 divorced or never married (the divorces I have seen in that set tended to happen once the woman cracked her career advancement up above her husband, which eventually rendered him unsuitable as a mate for some reason or other). The other 1/2 who are married generally are married to guys who are considerably older and more established (~10 years older or more), and therefore remain passing the alpha comparison test after she advances (i.e., she doesn’t advance ahead of them), and most of these have few children — I would say about half are married without kids. Keep in mind this is senior exec level here — not the midlevel execs, many of whom (men and women alike) tone it down and achieve “balance” at the expense of career advancement.

The “rub” comes mainly from women who are personally very ambitious and are annoyed that it is harder, from their perspective, to achieve both family goals and work professional goals (i.e., to get to the tippity top) than they think it is for men. What they fail to realize is that the reason this is so is precisely because of their own mate selection preferences. For all the women who complain that men are intimidated by more successful and ambitious women, I don’t generally see these women very interested in marrying guys who are happy to be capped in mid-level management and lead a balanced life, or a guy who would be happy being a SAHD from day 1. There are a handful of women who seek out men like that and are satisfied with it, but it’s a handful. If more women want to be soaring to the highest levels of the corporate and political hierarchies, they’re going to need to make themselves be attracted to men who are supportive, more downscaled in ambition, less successful and so on — and most women just can’t do that because it is wired in them not to be attracted to men who are “lesser” than they are themselves, for mates (not for short term sex).

So the solutions that women like Slaughter come up with are all basically hypergamy subsidies — they are seeking to have their mate decisions subsidized by rejiggering the hierarchical and promotional structures entirely to accomodate the ambitions of women without making them choose between hypergamy and career ambition. And the way to do this is to tamp down the “tall poppies” who will work harder and longer and in a more single-focused way, and instead reward people who work much less and from more comfortable conditions just because doing otherwise cramps the style of women who “want it all”. And the reason for this is that they are pissed to the high heavens that their “peer ambition” male colleagues have family lives that are managed by supportive spouses, because these guys are okay with, or even sought out and wanted, a supportive spouse rather than a hypergamously attractive one. So from the perspective of a woman like Slaughter, creating new workplace rules and norms is far preferable to making compromises around hypergamy, because the unstated underlying reality is that the entirety of the feminist revolution was, in many ways, about vindicating hypergamy full stop. So the answer can’t be found in tamping that down — no, the answer must be found in turning well-established and working structures completely upside down so as to vindicate the interests of female mating hypergamy in a way that the full exercise of such hypergamy does not have any negative consequences on the woman, or expose her to having to make trade-off type decisions. It’s quite clear that this is what it is.

One way to expose this is when a group of career women are bitching about this kind of thing to interject, in a disarming and joking way, that there are plenty of guys who’d be thrilled to be a supportive husband to an ambitious woman — and see the reaction you get. It touches a tender spot, I can tell you that, but at least for *some* women, it can make a light-bulb go off as to what is really going on here. There is no lack of men who would be interested in playing the role of a supportive spouse — there is, however, a lack of interest among these kinds of women, generally speaking, in such men as mates.

@Anacona

Another glaring problem is that we live in a global world, even if all women had the power to change the way USA schedules work to make it more friendly so women can have it all, that will only means that the other countries will have more productive and even more advantages against USA economy.

This is true to, to some degree. To be honest it’s really an issue for the top management. The middle management and line workers are getting a lot of flexibility now in a lot of corporate environments, but the road to the top is, well, hard. You don’t get to win the Tour de France or regularly win in Tennis or the PGA Tour by having a “balanced life” — doesn’t work that way. Life is competitive at the tippity top, because the people who are reaching for that brass ring will bend over backwards and sacrifice virtually everything in their lives to get it. This creates very driven and motivated people at the top — generally, it works, in terms of getting good people there, although there are always problems with greed and corruption in any system. But if you replace this with a system that penalizes people like that, you will end up with less talent at the top, and the driven people will simply take their ambition somewhere else — right out of the organization, if they have to. At the end of the day, you’ve hurt the organization and, if on a broader scale, the economy as a whole by driving this ambition elsewhere. Ambitious people — the hyper-ambitious ones who become CEOs and the like — are not like other people. They are truly driven people. They will find an outlet for that ambition, whether it is a productive one or not.

While your comment is VERY good, Brendan, and I cosign 99 percent there is one glaring problem with it:
You can’t structure a society and its rules around the needs and desires of the most ambitious, esp. when a considerable portion of those people :
A. Break gender roles
or
B. Want to be childless
or
C. are sociopaths willing to bend any rules of morality/ethics to get power

As our country increasingly becomes a corporateocracy this is an increasing problem. There’s more to a society and more to life than a “bottom line” based on arbitrary human trading rules.

I would like to believe that those “lower down the ladder” are getting more life-style flexibility but I’m not sure that’s mostly the case outside of at a few large firms, and even then its probably correlated with a decline in wages. This is because many of those at the top don’t see themselves as having anything in common with or owing any larger responsibility to those below them.
Ambition, like pride can be a good thing in measured doses. But you usually need to tether it on a larger scale if you want to have a successful society. We fail to do that in both the sexual market and the larger economic market.

I think, at this point, it would be worth re-reading Chapter 9 of The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon, which is entitled Sex at Work and in particular the two consecutive sections therein: Women are not orientated towards work, and The sexual division of labour.

These reveal that the number of women in FULL time work remains the same as it was 150 years ago! Further between 1995 and 2003 the percentage of women in PART time work rose from 44% to 48%. [These are all U.K. statistics] With men it was the reverse. In June 2001 a survey of 5,000 full-time working women revealed that only 9% said they would prefer full time work if they had a realistic choice. Moxon continues: “This compares with a majority of men, because men have no concept of an alternative to life-long full-time work which does not mean criminality or poverty – and – more to the point – loss of esteem”. He reveals that more women are set to move away from full to part time work and says that this is already happening. He continues: ” This will have the effect of course, of slowing or halting their rise into the topmost positions” and then: “Women have woken up to not just the stress and thorough lack of empowerment that work actually provides, but what is for women the pointlessness of it”. Then: ” Women do no compete with each other as men do – for status”. He then remarks on female Hypergamy and with a sentence Slaughter should have read: “Some women carry on, forever trying to climb; forgetting to jump-off as their work life becomes an unintended end in itself. These women appear to be very like men but they are not”. Of men he says: ” [Men] are dividing time between work and alternative means of acquiring status – sports, hobbies, pressure-group politics, some blind alley obsessions, developing something that may turn into work, serving in an official body of some sort; a vast array of activities that are competitive in some way. One option he is not interested in is to become a home-maker”. He continues – I paraphrase: Men who are forced into that role find their wives losing interest as that was not the basis on which they married their husband and divorce tends to follow.

Later he continues “All this is despite the colapse in female roles – housewife, mother, even exclusive sex-provider – which has left women feeling they have less scope, and so further encouraging them to fill male roles” but, “Men would (nearly) always be the primary breadwinners simply because they are less bad at this than bringing up baby. Women would (nearly) always be the primary care givers because they are clearly evolved for this function whereas men clearly are not” and then: “The family scenario is the default social expectation guiding economic behaviour” and he concludes: “Factor in the related intra-sexual competitive drive of men, which has only weak parallels in women, and it’s obvious to anybody that the Feminist ideal of a world of work devoid of any parameters related to sex, is perpetually unrealisable”.

Personally I find working with women impossible. They are always either making sexual advances or imagining (or hoping) that you are making them.

Yes, the data show that the number of women in full time work in Australia has not risen since the 1960s. The much touted increase in women working relates to part-time work. On the matter of househusbands, I retired recently, but my wife and I have connived to ensure that my status has hardly dropped. She works part-time and I do more for the family, but she continues to do the more feminine tasks.

As for women in the workplace, I never found them to be worse or more of a problem than men. I sometimes found that other women disliked female bosses, but those I had were no worse, or better, than the men.

Brendan, yes. Feminists are still women, and most are heterosexual. The underlying fear that drives feminism is of ending up married “to some boring guy”. Exciting, powerful men are still very welcome. Even the abortion thing is partly about fear of getting knocked up by a substandard man.

I would like to believe that those “lower down the ladder” are getting more life-style flexibility but I’m not sure that’s mostly the case outside of at a few large firms, and even then its probably correlated with a decline in wages. This is because many of those at the top don’t see themselves as having anything in common with or owing any larger responsibility to those below them.
Ambition, like pride can be a good thing in measured doses. But you usually need to tether it on a larger scale if you want to have a successful society. We fail to do that in both the sexual market and the larger economic market.
—————————————————————————————
99% vs 1% propaganda.
This assumes a static scenario OR relies on a form of victimhood ideology, which we cannot tolerate when feminists do it, we should not be espousing it ourselves.
Irrational fear of corporations is, well, empathological

That’s nice, Emp.
I suppose I should “take it” with a gun? After all, I can’t very well impose it on MegaCorp X myself.
When the average life is not structured in such a way as to encourage community or reproduction or -better yet, both – community dies, as does eventually the larger society. Arguably, in order to succeed in today’s society you either have to be corrupt or you have to sacrifice most normal human needs and desires to ambition for the most part.

That isn’t healthy and it doesn’t help with empathizing with your fellow humans. And arguably the world could use more real empathy, whether its of the temporary handouts to those in need type of thing or the “teach a man to fish” type of tutoring. This is , after all a country where a family can be destroyed due to a single grab of an arm, and a world where nine and ten year old boys are forced into armies and slightly older boys/girls forced into sex slavery.

I also have no problem calling the victim of a false accusation a victim. That doesn’t mean he or she has to STAY a victim -and I agree that victimology is no way to run ones life – but this ridiculous chest thumping I see some manospherians engage in is equally ridiculous. If the rules and culture of your society are messed up then -since one person can hardly ever change rules at that level barring the acquisition of absolute power- you will be a victim of them unless you find a way to bend them or move to another society. I’d maintain that most American workers -heck, most workers world-wide – are exploited to various degrees.

There’s nothing wrong with noticing this and being angry about it. And since MegaCorp X ultimately does owe allegiance to either the consumers of the world or, arguably , a specific nation-state, there is nothing wrong with reminding them of that from time to time.

What is the larger purpose of our country?
We should all ask that from time to time.

Great responses from Brendan and Opus, really nailed it. I think red pillars need to take this article seriously and give the necessary verbal beat down before it fuels the delusions out there even further. This is truly the Year of the Hamster. More social engineering to follow.

No matter what the personal decision, women will be discontent with it. This is articles illustrates why Slaughter’s plea to change the world to better accommodate women’s choices is not only the pinnacle of self-important arrogance, but also a fool’s errand. Even under the most ideal circumstance women will ALWAYS find something imperfect to claim victimhood over. The innate, insecurity that hypergamy has hardcoded into women’s psyche’s assures that they will never find complete satisfaction in any aspect of their personal decisions. The doubt engendered by hypergamy perpetuates a constant dissatisfaction and any subsequent societal, personal or relational fallout left in its wake be damned.

Rollo, we have not evolved to be happy. Especially women. The truth is that women are just less happy than men. Nothing will change that. It may simply be hormones. Testosterone lifts mood. Women are low in testosterone. Ergo …

David CollardBrendan, yes. Feminists are still women, and most are heterosexual. The underlying fear that drives feminism is of ending up married “to some boring guy”. Exciting, powerful men are still very welcome. Even the abortion thing is partly about fear of getting knocked up by a substandard man.

That is a very interesting view. Upon a moment’s reflection, I believe it is correct. And it may be more than just “partly”, too.

Is it an accident that some version of abortion on demand swept the industrialized world at more or less the same time as divorce on demand? I do not think so. Abortion, like divorce, enables a woman to ‘trade up’ in her choice of men. The two together make it very easy for a woman to drop one man, and move on to another with no “encumbrance” tagging along. There are too many cases in history where a woman murdered her children as part of a pursuit of some new man for this to be a coincidence (Susan Smith, now in prison in South Carolina, being but one example).

Clarence, c’mon, you know the purpose of not just the country you live in, but Western civilization.

To make women happy and nothing else. So long as one woman is unhappy, all is failure and must be changed. Economic, social and legal systems only have worth in so far as they promote women’s haaaapiness.

Here’s a pretty good article written by a woman at the New York Post who tells Anne-Marie Slaughter that, while
women may complain about not “having it all”, men have never been able to “have it all” …

The trouble with that rebuttal is that someone like Slaughter would simply say: “I agree, and that’s why the workplace practices should be changed for everyone, so that men and women can both ‘have it all'” and so on.